New Black Holes Do 'Ring' MIT Researchers Discover

CAMBRIDGE, MA — It looks like Albert Einstein may have been right on this one, too. Physicists from MIT who have been studying the ringing of an newborn black hole, may have found that per Einstein's theory of general relativity there's a pattern of ringing when two black holes collide and it can predict the black hole’s mass and spin.

If Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity holds true, the school said in a release, then a black hole, born from the cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, should itself “ring” in the aftermath, producing gravitational waves much like a struck bell reverbates sound waves. Einstein predicted that the particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves should be a direct signature of the newly formed black hole’s mass and spin.

The researchers were able to identify the pattern of a black hole’s ringing, and, using Einstein’s equations, calculated the mass and spin that the black hole should have, given its ringing pattern. These calculations matched measurements of the black hole’s mass and spin made previously by others.

The researcher's findings were published Friday in "Physical Review Letters."

“We all expect general relativity to be correct, but this is the first time we have confirmed it in this way,” the study’s lead author, Maximiliano Isi, a NASA Einstein Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research said in a statement. “This is the first experimental measurement that succeeds in directly testing the no-hair theorem. It doesn’t mean black holes couldn’t have hair. It means the picture of black holes with no hair lives for one more day.”

Read more at MIT Ringing Black Hole